Blog and Sudoku

I just discovered this morning that comments on my Daily Writer blog haven't been getting through to me by email, so possibly a number of commenters have given up on me, thinking I'm too rude to respond.  For some reason this particular blog, even though it's part of the Blogger family, doesn't act the same, and there are certain differences I can't quite get to grips with.  It shouldn't be the fact that it's an older blog (dating from 2005), because the one I'm writing on now is even older (by a few months).   Yet this blog has kept up with the various Blogger changes while the other one seems to be stuck in an earlier age.

On a less messy note, I wrote to the Otago Daily Times the other day because it has puzzled me for some time that the medium Sudoku puzzles published in their paper were often harder than the hard ones.   They passed the email onto Doug Hendry from The Puzzle Company.  He replied: 

The series you [the Otago Daily Times newspaper] run is one where we actually tried to create more difference between the medium and hard puzzles.

We can make puzzles on quite a few different settings. The actual level of difficulty in each varies widely, and the biggest range seems to lie within the medium setting. As Mr Crowl pointed out, they can be as challenging – or actually harder – than a puzzle made on the hard setting.

One solution we came up with was to make more difference between the levels. We took the Easy and Medium settings down half a notch, and left the hard unchanged.

I’d be interested in getting Mr Crowl’s opinion on the attached puzzles.

I’ve put three medium and three hard from your current series on a layout, but not identified which is which. If he has the time and the inclination, I’d really appreciate it if he printed the sheet out and tried them, then emailed to say which ones he thinks are medium and which are hard.

This isn’t a test of his Sudoku ability, it’s a test of our puzzle making.


Well, firstly it was nice to get such an immediate response to a query, and one that was offering a solution as to why the puzzles varied.  I tired all six of the puzzles and this was my reply to Doug:

1. fairly hard
2. hard (didn't finish it in fact, which is sometimes the case with Sudoku in the paper)
3. definitely the easiest. 
4. fairly hard
5 hard
6 hard (again I didn't finish this one because I got stuck and couldn't move forward on it - might need more perseverance)


Doug replied:

I printed out the puzzles I sent you and gave them a go. Usually I can only solve Easy puzzles, and occasionally rise to the heights of Medium. Hard, never.  [He says he's the company's crossword expert, while his wife is the Sudoku master.]

I managed to solve No1 (which was a Medium), but it took me 25 minutes. I got seven numbers in No2 (Hard), then gave up. I think I could have solved No3 (Medium) but went wrong somewhere after having filled in more than half.

It took me 10 minutes to get four boxes in No4 (Hard), then I gave up.

No5 (Medium) – I got stuck after taking 15 minutes to get half of it filled in.

I didn’t bother trying No6.

So, I was able to solve – with a real effort – one of the mediums, and might have got another. The three hard puzzles were totally beyond me.

You solved all three Mediums and one Hard.

This was only a test on three of each type, but you and I both found the Hard puzzles more difficult than the Medium, and you found the Mediums simpler than I did.

There will be occasions when a Medium puzzle at the upper end of its difficulty scale will be as hard – or maybe even harder – than a Hard puzzle which is at the bottom end of its range of difficulty.

So there you have it.  An interesting exercise, and a gracious response on both occasions.   How to do business, in other words!

The Sudoku in the picture is a finished example from this Dan Rice's site. 

Concert tonight

Concert tonight, and it's one of those waiting-around days, when you're not really sure what to do with yourself. I've done some practice, though not as much as yesterday, and played through some other music to try and stop myself feeling a bit stale at working on the same pieces over and over. (The thing is, if they're not right now they certainly won't be any better tonight!) But I need to have my fingers up and running when I start, as there won't be any second chances. (Although, at the last concert, one of the singers missed an entry twice, and we finished up doing the first 10 bars or so three times...!)

So:
I've done the Sudoku in the Otago Daily Times, and the easier of the two cryptic crosswords;
we've been to the e-day and taken an older printer there and a couple of cellphones (and met my son, who was volunteering);
we've done the food shopping for the week, plus getting some items for the supper tonight;
I've planted a bunch of dahlias in the garden by the drive;
I've listened to my daughter bewailing the problems she's had with what was a very expensive digital camera with a great movie function that she can't edit on her laptop. This problem has been going on since she got the camera, and is now exacerbated by the fact that the video section of the camera is virtually full and she can't download the video - even the software's not working properly. At the moment she's managing to get it backed up to my PC, but it's going to take all night by the looks of it...!

I wonder if this is how Mozart, or Beethoven or some other equally esteemed composer spent their Saturday before going off to the Konzerthaus...?


My photo of dahlias in our garden towards the end of summer, along with the red stalks of the silver beet.

Cryptic crosswords

It's been a strange thing that since my mother has been in hospital I've been doing the cryptic crosswords in the daily paper almost completely on my own - not only in the sense that my mother hasn't been helping (she no longer can) but also in the sense that I'm not even using the usual help tools, such as one or other of the little electronic 'machines' that help figure out crosswords or anagrams, or the thesaurus. Either the puzzles have been easier than usual, or else my brain is relaxed enough (having the time to do them without having to worry about other things I should be doing) to just get on and think. I can't say the sudokus have been quite so successful, but I have a suspicion that the paper has got them out of sync: the ones marked with one star, which should be easy, have been quite tough, and today's two-star job was also difficult to get moving on. Last week they published as the answer to the previous day's sudoku exactly the same sudoku as you were doing - without the answers. Since then things haven't been good!